Turning to the left or to the center?

Is President Barack Obama governing from the left or from the center? It’s a question no one quite seems to have a clear answer to. The post-ideological positioning that worked so well during the campaign is not proving as effective at holding the electoral coalition together given the mounting pressures of governing.

During the campaign, Obama nodded to the left on the Iraq war and civil liberties, but he also sent signals to the center that he would operate in a generally bipartisan manner, pursue the Afghanistan war vigorously and not raise taxes on 95 percent of all Americans. Centrist voters are looking to see that these promises are kept.

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While the White House communications have been stellar overall, the echo chamber out there has left some uncertainty about important issues in the voters’ minds. Is the administration for or against waging the Afghanistan war on an all-out basis, including taking down the Taliban? Are jobs or regulating Wall Street its top priority? Should the insurance drug companies be reined in or an accommodation reached?

Each key administration policy has hit a logjam. Afghanistan, the generals said, requires even more troops. The economy hit the 10 percent tripwire of unemployment and continues to rise. And the fate of health care reform is uncertain.

At the same time, the national mood is souring. While the administration has been saying the economy is on the uptick, the only measure most families care about — unemployment — is reaching new highs. To most families, a jobless recovery is no recovery at all.

This rising anxiety came out in the off-year elections with the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial losses and is reflected further in polls suggesting Republican congressional candidates have an advantage in the 2010 midterms.

The increased anxiety is also evident in the declining right track-wrong track numbers, with a decisive majority now seeing the country headed in the wrong direction and the highest percentage of voters in modern history now reporting they are independents, unaffiliated with any party.

The answer to all of this is straightforward: take some simple and strong positions on these complex issues.

The Afghanistan decision has the president squarely in the cross hairs of the left vs. center debate. He said over and over how this was the battle worth fighting — how it was the forgotten war on terrorism. But with his foreign affairs mentor, Vice President Joe Biden, leading the charge out of the war and his new general leading the charge into it, the president is clearly conflicted about what action to take. On top of that, he has been redefining the mission to no longer specify the Taliban as the enemy and to focus on rooting out Al Qaeda — a major shift on war and foreign policy.